Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

Uncle Walt goes sideways

Posted on | February 9, 2007 | No Comments

Walter Cronkite is fretting about the death of democracy thanks to media consolidation at a Columbia University speech where they didn’t hand out brown paper bags for hyperventilators. Walt must not be spending too much time online these days. And he forgets that he was in the vanguard of the first wave of information homogenization driven by the rise of television networks in the 1950s and ’60s. Of course he has to say these things at a school with a storied journalism department, but he fails to grasp the concept that a journalist’s role is changing under his feet.

“In this information age and the very complicated world in which we live today, the need for high-quality reporting is greater than ever,” he told journalism students and professionals at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It’s not just the journalist’s job at risk here. It’s American democracy. It is freedom.”

Cronkite couples two concepts in that quote shouldn’t be, necessarily. It’s nice to have a job with a media company and pursue the craft of journalism. But good journalism doesn’t necessarily emerge from the model. In fact you can point to the blogosphere and any number of non-fiction books published in the past 10 years (think Krakauer, Junger) in which good journalism was produced by people not employed fulltime in the media.
Hey all journalists want the perfect life: get paid to report and write the stories that you want to write, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
Media evolves and the most important media that has evolved in the last 20 years are niche community publications and the blogosphere. Could it be that political elections seem more contentious these days because a three networks and one national newspaper aren’t dictating terms any more? Just a thought.

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Category: journalism

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